I began my fieldwork in the trailer park hanging out in the office, where some of my neighbors spent most of their days. I was in the office the evening Larraine walked in, shaking and gripping a warning from the sheriff’s eviction squad. I watched her pay Tobin what she could before dragging herself back to her trailer. I followed her there. Larraine opened the door, wiping away tears with the bottom of her shirt. That’s how we met. After word spread that I was interested in talking to people going through an eviction, Pam got ahold of my phone number and called me up. A few days after we met, I began trailing her and her family as they looked for a new place to live. Pam told Scott about my project, and he told me to stop by his trailer. When I did one morning, Scott stepped outside and said, “Let’s walk.” Then he said, “Well, let’s just get this out in the open. I was a nurse for…years. But then I got addicted to painkillers and lost everything. My job, my car, my house.”
No one really knows why some people unfurl like this in front of a stranger with a notepad and pen, why they open the door and let you in. With tenants on the verge of homelessness, there were material benefits, like access to a car and phone, and psychological ones, too. Several called me their “shrink.” But there is another truth too, which is that some people at the bottom don’t think they have anything left to lose. One evening at the Aldea Recovery House, where Scott had been living sober for a few months, Scott nodded to me scribbling away in my notepad and asked AA diehard Anna Aldea, “Does it make you nervous, having Matt here?”
“Fuck no,” Anna said. “My life is an open book.”
Said Scott, “I am the same way. You know, I’ve got no pride or anything left.”
—
When fall arrived, having seen Scott, Larraine, and Pam and Ned evicted from the trailer park, I began looking for a new place to live on the North Side. One day, I mentioned this to Officer Woo, one of the security guards Tobin had been forced to hire to appease Alderman Witkowski. Woo’s real name was Kimball, but he told everyone to call him by his childhood nickname. A gregarious black man who tried to make friends with everyone in the park, he wore size 6 XL T-shirts and a security badge he had picked up at an army surplus shop.
“You talkin’ about moving out by Silver Spring?” Woo asked, thinking about an area where Milwaukee’s black inner city gave way to the northern suburbs of Glendale and Brown Deer.
“I’m thinking like city center,” I clarified.
“You want to be by Marquette?” Woo asked again, referencing the Jesuit university located downtown.
“Not by Marquette. I’m looking for an inner-city neighborhood.”
Woo squinted at me, assuming he had misunderstood. It took a few more conversations for Woo to realize that I wanted to live on the North Side, in a neighborhood like his, where the street signs were green, not blue like in the suburb of Wauwatosa. Once he did, Woo invited me to live with him in a rooming house on First and Locust. The rent was $400, utilities included. I accepted and paid the landlords: Sherrena and Quentin.
The rooming house was on the second floor of a duplex, white with green trim. Woo and I shared a living room, bathroom, and kitchen, whose cupboards could be padlocked to keep your roommates from eating your food. My room came with a window, draped with a heavy blanket, and a full-size bed, under which I found an empty can of Classic Ice, Narcotics Anonymous pamphlets, toenail clippers, and a typewriter in a hard plastic case. Behind the rooming house was an alley, tagged in rushed Gangster Disciples graffiti, and a small weedy backyard with a cherry tree that, come May, unveiled soft blossoms that looked like a spray of confetti. I lived in the rooming house until June 2009.
Woo had told Sherrena that I was “working on a book about landlords and tenants.” Sherrena agreed to an interview, at the end of which I made my pitch.
“Sherrena, I would love to be kind of like your apprentice,” I said, explaining that my goal was to “walk in [her] shoes as closely as possible.”
Sherrena was all-in. “I’m committed to this,” she said. “You have your person.” She was in love with her work and proud of it too. She wanted people to know “what landlords had to go through,” to share her world with a wider public that rarely stopped to consider it.
I began shadowing Sherrena and Quentin as they bought property, screened tenants, unclogged sewer pipes, and delivered eviction notices, just as I had done with Tobin and Lenny. I met Arleen, Lamar, and the Hinkston clan through Sherrena. Later, I met Crystal through Arleen, and Vanetta through Crystal. Doreen was lonely and happy to have someone to sit and talk with. Lamar warmed to me after I helped him paint Patrice’s old unit; I later sealed the deal by being decent at spades, which I used to play regularly during my days working as a firefighter in college.
Arleen was a much tougher case. At first, she kept me at a distance and would remain silent when I explained my project to her. When I tried to fill the silence, she would cut me off, saying, “You don’t need to keep talking.” Her biggest worry was that I worked for Child Protective Services. “I feel uncomfortable talking with you,” Arleen told me during one of our early conversations, “not because of how you are, but just because of all this stuff that’s happened to me. I’ve been in the [child welfare] system so long that I just don’t trust people anymore.” I responded by saying that I understood, giving her some of my published work—which I had learned to keep in my car for moments like this—and, later, taking it very slowly, limiting myself to only a handful of questions per meeting.
Other people thought I was a police officer or, in the trailer park, a spy for the alderman. Still others thought I was a drug addict or a john. (For a time, Woo and I lived with sex workers in the rooming house.) Sherrena introduced me as her assistant. To Tobin, I was nobody.
Some tenants suspected I was in cahoots with their landlord, whom they referred to as “your friend.” On several occasions, they tried to get me to admit to their landlord’s wrongdoing, like the time Lamar pressured me to admit Sherrena was “a slumlord.” When I refused, Lamar accused me of being her snoop. Some landlords refused to discuss the details of a tenant’s case or, in the opposite direction, asked me to weigh in on a specific case. My policy was to intervene as little as possible (although, as I describe below, I abandoned that policy on two occasions), but landlords often forced my hand. To my knowledge, the only time I had any real effect on a case was the time Sherrena asked me repeatedly if she should call the sheriff on Arleen. I finally said no, and she didn’t. Sherrena later told me, “Had you not been involved, honestly, truly, I would have done the writ and been waiting on the sheriff….If you didn’t intervene, she would have been dead meat.” So instead of Eagle Moving taking her things, Arleen got to store them in Public Storage until they were trashed for missed payments.
After a while, both tenants and landlords began to accept me and get on with their lives. They had more important things to worry about. I sat beside tenants at eviction court, helped them move, followed them into shelters and abandoned houses, watched their children, fought with them, and slept at their houses. I attended church with them, as well as counseling sessions, AA meetings, funerals, and births. I followed one family to Texas. I visited Iowa with Scott. As I spent more time with people, something like trust emerged, even if it remained a fragile, heavily qualified trust.2 Years after meeting, Arleen would still ask me, during a quiet moment, if I worked for Child Protective Services.
—
If moving to the North Side initially confused Woo, it deeply disturbed my neighbors in the trailer park. When I told Larraine, she nearly cried, “No, Matt. You don’t know how dangerous it is.” Beaker chimed in: “They don’t cotton to white folks over there.”
But the truth is that white people are afforded special privileges in the ghetto. For one, my interactions with the police were nonintrusive and quick, even after a pair of separate shootings happened outside my front door. Once, I watched a police officer pull his patrol car up to Ger-Ger, Arleen’s eldest son,
and say, “Man, you’re fucked up!” (Ger-Ger had a learning disability that caused him to move and talk slowly.) When I came out of the apartment for a closer look, the officer looked at me and drove away. He might have acted differently had I not been a white man with a notepad.
There were other moments like this. Take Crystal and Vanetta’s exchange with the discriminating landlord on Fifteenth Street. When that went down, I was outside in the car, watching Vanetta’s kids. The women told me about it when they returned, immediately afterward. I copied down the landlord’s number from the rent sign and called him up the next day. Meeting him in the same unit Vanetta and Crystal had been shown, I told him I took home about $1,400 a month (Vanetta and Crystal’s combined income), that I had three kids (like Vanetta), and that I’d really like a unit with a bathtub. The landlord told me that he had another unit available. He even drove me to it in his Saab. I reported him to the Fair Housing Council. They took down my report and never called me back.
Inner-city residents took care to protect me and make sure I wasn’t taken advantage of, as when Lamar would snap at his boys—“Cut that shit out!”—when they asked me for a dollar. One day at the rooming house, C.C., one of my downstairs neighbors, asked to borrow a few dollars so she could buy trash bags. I obliged and went back to writing. But Keisha, Woo’s young niece who was living with us at the time, kept an eye on C.C. as she left and claimed to see her call her dope man. Oblivious to this, I soon headed out for the store. When Woo got home, Keisha told him about the exchange, and he called me, angry. “Matt, you don’t ever give her nothing!” he said. “They think because you not like us, because you not from around here, that they can just come at you like that….I’m about to go down there and tell them to give you your fucking money back.”
“Well, Woo, look—”
“Uh-uh, Matt.”
Woo hung up. I don’t know exactly what he said to C.C., but when I got home, she met me outside, wearing a wig, cut-off shorts, a revealing halter top, and strappy heels. C.C. handed me the money. I didn’t ask how she got it.
It felt terrible. “You’re too protective of me,” I told Woo when I got upstairs.
He was leaning over the kitchen sink, washing dishes shirtless. “You suburbs. We ’hood,” he began, using his low, father-to-son voice he reserved for moments like this. “And you came down here, took a chance living in the ’hood with me. And that was a real honor for me, and I feel responsible for you here. I ain’t let nothing happen to you.”
A white person living in and writing about the inner city is not uniquely exposed to threats but uniquely shielded from them. And inner-city residents sometimes stiffened in my presence. People often started cleaning up and apologizing after meeting me for the first time. In my late twenties, I was called “sir” countless more times than I was told by some young tough to get a “G pass”—a “gangster pass,” essentially to account for my white self. These are nontrivial issues for someone trying to record life as it is actually lived. The only thing to do is to spend as much time on the ground as you can, transforming yourself from novelty to perpetual foreigner. People generally relax and go about their business with enough time, even if their guard can fly up again in certain circumstances.
It takes time too, to be taught how to notice things by people like Keisha, who have learned when to listen and what to look for. The people I met in Milwaukee trained my vision by modeling how to see and showing me how to make sense of what I saw. Still, I know I missed a lot, especially in the beginning, not only because I was an outsider but also because I was constantly overanalyzing things. A buzzing inner monologue would often draw me inward, hindering my ability to remain alert to the heat of life at play right in front of me. It’s safer that way. Our ideas allow us to tame social life, to order it according to typologies and theories. As Susan Sontag has warned, this comfort can “deplete the world” and get in the way of seeing.3
—
Researching this book involved spending long stretches of time with women, often in their homes, which raised suspicions. In two incidents, men accused me of sleeping with their girlfriends. The first occurred during a drunken argument between Ned and Pam, when Ned snapped: “You’re the one talking to Matt, like he’s a fucking psychologist….Why don’t you go fuck him.” After Ned stormed off, Pam said to me, “He thinks we’re fucking. How pathetic is that?” The fight died down, and Ned backed off from the accusation. But several weeks after that happened, I kept my distance from Pam and tried spending as much time with Ned as I could. On another occasion, I stopped by to see Vanetta the month before she was sentenced to prison and found her with Earl, an older man she had met at the Lodge. Earl had taken a strong romantic interest in Vanetta, an interest she entertained, and he was not happy to see me. Said Earl, “You see, this is my woman. And I should know what my woman is doing.” I took my time explaining my job to Earl and showed him my previous work. I thought he was capable of hurting Vanetta—his rap sheet contained domestic-abuse charges—or at least of leaving her and taking his VA check with him. Earl eventually apologized to me, but the exchange was deeply unsettling. When I left, I asked Vanetta’s sister, Ebony, to check on Vanetta, which she did. And the next morning, I called to make sure everything was okay. “He don’t scare me, though,” Vanetta told me. He should have. After Vanetta got out of prison and broke it off with Earl, someone shot up Ebony’s apartment, where Vanetta and her children were staying. Everyone suspected Earl.
I’ve always felt that my first duty as an ethnographer was to make sure my work did not harm those who invited me into their lives. But this can be a complicated and delicate matter because it is not always obvious at first what does harm.4 Especially in poor neighborhoods, nothing is free. People get compensated for favors one way or another. Ned and Earl figured that if I was giving their girlfriends rides as they looked for housing and went about their business, I must be getting something in return. I was, of course: stories. That was the strange thing. Their accusations were perfectly valid, and I took them seriously.
Gender influenced how people behaved and talked in my presence in other ways too. After prison, Vanetta found a job running tables at a George Webb restaurant and met a new man, Ben, who aspired to be a truck driver. One night in their apartment, Ben left abruptly. “Are you guys okay?” I asked.
“Not really.” Vanetta sighed. “He thinks I act too much like a man.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“It’s like I know too much….He’s always like, ‘You acting like a man. Like, you always have to have an answer to everything.’ ”
“You ever pretend not to know stuff?”
“Sometimes.”
Right then I wondered how often Vanetta had played dumb with me, how often she had faked ignorance to appear more ladylike.
Everything about you—your race and gender, where and how you were raised, your temperament and disposition—can influence whom you meet, what is confided to you, what you are shown, and how you interpret what you see. My identity opened some doors and closed others. In the end, we can only do the best we can with who we are, paying close attention to the ways pieces of ourselves matter to the work while never losing sight of the most important questions.5
—
While living in Milwaukee, I was a full-time fieldworker. Most days, I carried a digital recorder and just let it run. This allowed me to capture people’s words verbatim. I also carried a small notepad and wrote down observations and conversations, usually as they were happening. I never hid the fact that I was a writer trying to record as much as I could. In the evenings and early mornings, I would spend hours typing up the jottings from my notebooks and writing about the day’s events. I took thousands of photographs. I conducted more than one hundred interviews with people not featured in this book, including thirty landlords. I spoke with and observed court officers, social workers, building inspectors, property managers, and other people who lived in the trailer park or inne
r city.
When I left the field, I began a long process of transcribing the recorded material. Some people helped me with this, but I did a significant amount myself. After everything was down on paper, my notes spanned over five thousand single-spaced pages. I began poring over the words, calling up the photographs, and listening to recordings on my way to work or when rocking my newborn to sleep. I read and reread everything several times before I felt ready to begin writing.6 I wanted to be as close to the material as possible, to experience a kind of second immersion in the words and scenes. And I missed everyone. Moving from the North Side of Milwaukee to Cambridge, Massachusetts—a rich, rarefied community—was profoundly disorienting. At first, all I wanted was to be back in the trailer park or the inner city. I returned as often as I could.
Writing this book, I have prioritized firsthand observation. When something important happened that I didn’t see, I spoke to multiple people about the event whenever possible and checked details by drawing on other sources, such as news reports, medical or court records, and mortgage files. I have indicated in the notes all events sourced from secondhand accounts. I said that someone “thought” or “believed” something only when they said as much to me. When writing about things that happened in people’s past, I said someone “remembered” or “recalled” it a certain way. To interrogate those details, I would ask the same person the same questions multiple times over several years. This proved to be incredibly useful, as some things people told me at the beginning turned out to be inaccurate. Sometimes, the truth comes out slow.
As much as possible, I vetted the material in this book by reaching out to third parties. Often, this meant confirming the possibility of something happening, if not the thing itself. For example, I was able to verify with the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families that the welfare sanctions Arleen experienced were not uncommon. I had overheard Arleen explain the sanctions to Sherrena and had accompanied Arleen as she met with a caseworker to sort out the details; but because this was something I could corroborate with a few emails and phone calls, I did. After all, eyewitnessing is a fraught and imperfect thing, as any defense attorney will tell you. Things hide in plain sight and misdirection is everywhere. I dropped stories that could not be verified through this method. Once, Natasha Hinkston told me that she stopped going to high school after there was a shooting in her cafeteria. After confirming this story with Doreen, I found myself drawn to it, eager to include it somewhere, which is an impulse I’ve learned to mistrust. So I spoke with three separate Milwaukee Public School administrators, none of whom could confirm that a shooting occurred around the time Natasha said it did. Perhaps something did happen and the administrators were wrong; perhaps the gist (if not the details) of Natasha’s story was true; perhaps not. Whatever the case, I excluded this account and two others that could not be corroborated in this manner. Once the book was fully drafted, I hired an independent fact-checker.7 I also traveled to Milwaukee and Brownsville, Tennessee, to tie up loose ends.8
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